The issue is that the Essbase Cube views exceeded the limit of 4503600000000000. At first, I thought this message was related to the number of cells in the cube. But cell limits were not the issue. It was views. Views are determined by the number of levels in each dimension (multiply all levels for all dimension to get the cube total views). Last month my cube had a total of 1.2413e+015, which is close to the limit, but still under. I had one dimension switch from being dynamic with just 1 level (all dynamic dims have only 1 level) to being a multiple hierarchy stored dim with 7 levels. This increased the view size to 8.6890e+015 and exceed the view limit. I had to reset the dimesion settings back to dynamic in order to get the outline to deploy properly. Hopefully this help someone understand the issue if they receive this error message.

Thanks for the reply. I am a big fan. I have your book on Essbase Studio and found it to be very valuable when learning to use the tool.

This cube does actually have 30 standard dimensions. It is a bad design that we inherited from a Third Party developer a few years back. It is very slow to update and query. It will be redevloped soon to provide a better solution. The cube really only needs about 12 standard dimensions and all the rest could be attributes, or combined into shared hierachies, etc.

The error message was odd because it is not listed in the standard Essbase Error Message Reference doc and I couldn't find anything about the maximum views limit on any forums or other documentation.

Not to take anything away from the value of your real-world example, John, but this is actually documented in the DBAG: Limits

I've hit it myself. Because it's the product of levels, you don't even have to have an incredible number of dimensions to do it - one eight-level dimension, for example, is just as 'bad' as three two-level dimensions.

The Error Message Reference does seem to be the last to get updated (if at all)!